The effects of redundant communications on the behavior of listeners: Does a picture need a thousand words?

Abstract

Using a referential communication paradigm, two types of, informative messages, contrastive and redundant, were compared developmentally in terms of their relative effects on the accuracy of listeners' responses as a function of task variables. Contrastive messages contained the minimal information necessary to distinguish a referent from a nonreferent. Redundant messages contained additional information. We predicted that redundant messages would be more effective than contrastive ones when the stimulus array was too complex for a listener to notice all aspects of it in the allotted time. Also manipulated were the order of presentation of the message and array and the delay between the two in order to determine how these factors would contribute to task complexity. Subjects were first-and third-graders and college students. The stimuli were drawings of cartoonlike figures. The results confirmed our predictions for the older subjects but not for the younger ones. The discussion of the data centered on why the picture-message sequence, was a more difficult sequence than the message-picture one for all age groups.